Sweet Talking Money. Harry Bingham
rid of Bryn was to hear him out. ‘Upstairs, then. I’ve left my tea.’
They walked up the spiral staircase to Cameron’s office. Windows looked out in each direction: north and east over central London, south and west over the river. ‘You’ll be a bloody princess in here,’ Dai had said as he’d finished the room, ‘all you need now is the knight in shining armour.’ The tower room did have something of the fairy-tale about it, but what Bryn thought of was ivory towers, academic scientists cut off from the real world, out of sight and out of touch. Cameron rummaged amongst her rapidly growing mounds of papers and found a long-cooled cup of camomile tea. ‘Ugh,’ she sipped it and put it down. ‘Forget that. OK. Shoot.’
‘Good.’ Bryn found a wooden storage cupboard that hadn’t yet been swamped by clutter and sat down. ‘First point, we need money, lots of it, I estimate twenty million pounds.’
‘So you keep saying. I don’t see us needing more than five.’
‘Look. Five million pounds only covers your human research phase. It gets you to where you’ve already got to with rats.’
‘Right. Which, as I recall, was a one hundred per cent cure of all viral diseases tested.’
‘Good. That’s the hard part, but not the most important part.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake. What’s this? A lecture on the profit motive? You’re confusing me with someone who gives a damn. Please get this. I – don’t – care.’
She stood up and reached for her tea, wanting to move it to a safer spot, but Bryn interrupted. He was in a fury of impatience. He was the boss, head of the company, chief executive. At Berger Scholes he’d been a Managing Director, able to snap orders at nearly anyone in the firm and have them obeyed. Yet here he was, for all his notional power, unable even to hold a conversation with his most critical employee. He leaped to his feet and, as Cameron reached for the tea, he grabbed it first and slammed it down on a window sill.
‘No,’ he snapped. ‘This is not about profits. It’s something you need to hear. Please.’
Cameron breathed out in a sigh. ‘OK. Go ahead.’
‘Good. Now, you just told me that you can cure all major viral diseases in rats.’
‘If we get ’em early. If the disease has progressed far, then –’
‘OK. If you get ’em early, a hundred per cent. Now, tell me, could I do that? Take the Schoolroom, cure your rats?’
What? You?’
‘Yes, me. Could I personally cure a rat with an early-stage viral disease?’
‘No way. Never.’
‘How about a doctor, let’s say an infectious diseases guy in a busy hospital? A nurse? A lab assistant?’
Cameron blew out through her nose and glanced unceremoniously at her watch. ‘Listen, Kati and I can cure those rats because for the last five years we’ve worked on nothing else at all. We know our rats. We know our blood. We know our viruses. We know the Schoolroom. We know –’
‘Exactly,’ said Bryn, holding up his hand. ‘Thank you. Now tell me, once you’ve finished your human work, and you and Kati are getting a close to one hundred per cent cure rate, it’s going to be the same, isn’t it?’
Cameron looked blank, unsure what he was getting at. He continued. ‘You’ve got a technique for curing people, but no one knows how to use it. By your own statement, it takes five years of training to use the Schoolroom competently, which is four years, eleven months and two weeks too long.’ Holding his hands in front of him like a conductor damping the orchestra’s sound, he said, ‘The point is your technology’s useless unless people use it. Me, a nurse, a busy doctor, a lab guy. With training, of course. A week or two. Even a month or two. But not five years, plus a medical doctorate, plus a research doctorate, plus a brain the size of a planet which everyone tells me is going to get a Nobel Prize one of these days.’
He stopped abruptly. It was an odd way to deliver a compliment. She wrinkled her mouth in embarrassed acknowledgement of the praise.
‘Uh. I see your point.’
‘Right. So five million pounds for your clinical trials. I’ve allowed eight million, because these things run over. Then another dozen or so for development. Turning the Schoolroom into a box of tricks which anyone can use, me, a nurse, a lab guy, whoever.’
‘Hence twenty million.’
‘And hence Malcolm Milne.’
Now that Bryn no longer had to force his words at his recalcitrant partner, the space between them had grown too narrow. Cameron swivelled to look out of the window, where the black Thames marched silently towards Chelsea, Westminster, and St Paul’s. London was a new city for her, a new adventure. She still didn’t know whether her escape from Boston was the smartest move she’d ever made, or the stupidest. Bryn moved back, scuffing some piles of books on the floor. Cameron glanced at her watch, then returned her gaze to Bryn. ‘OK. I get the money part. I take the point.’
‘I knew you’d –’
‘But Malcolm Milne, no way. Sorry, but no.’
3
‘I heard him,’ said Cameron patiently. ‘He was talking about exit. He was talking about selling the company.’
‘Yes, it’s how venture capital works. Milne has to sell out to repay his investors.’
‘How long before he sells?’
‘Five years, maybe seven, maybe one. It’s his call.’
‘Who’ll control the company? You, or Milne and his cronies?’
‘The Board controls the company. The shareholders appoint the Board.’
‘That’s a bullshit answer.’
‘OK. It depends how much of the business I sell. Since all we’ve got at this stage is an idea, I’ll probably have to sell seventy or eighty per cent to raise enough money. But even if I could persuade Milne to take just forty-nine per cent, he’d still require a say in all major decisions.’
‘So Milne either controls the company or he has a veto?’
‘It’s not in his interest to screw things up.’
‘His interest, huh?’ There was another, longer pause. Cameron found a rubber band on the bench beside her and pinged it out into the dark, out on to the sleeping river. ‘And when his time’s up, who does Milne sell us to?’
Bryn spread his hands at an impossible question. ‘Maybe he floats us on the stockmarket. Maybe he sells us to a company in a related business, maybe … Well, anyone, whoever offers most.’
‘Such as a drugs company scared by our technology?’
‘Cameron, he can sell us to anyone he wants. He needs to make a profit. It’s the rules of the game.’
‘The rules of the game say he can sell us to Corinth?’
Bryn shook his head. ‘Yes, that’s possible, but really –’
‘Really what? Back in Boston, you said that – what’s-his-face – Hosanna –’
‘Huizinga.’
‘– saw this as a him or us situation, a game worth one hundred billion dollars to him. Why wouldn’t he buy us? Buy us, then drop the technology? That’s a crazy risk to take.’
‘It’s a risk you won’t be able to take, without funding.’
Cameron stared out into the black night. Across the water, streetlights shone orange through a screen of winter trees while